Ninja Notes

Let us help you teach like a ninja!

BrainNinjasWP

15 Simple Machines Activities that Will Hook Your Students

by

Are you looking for activities you can use to teach upper elementary students about simple machines and their connections to every day life? We pulled together our favourite activities in one convneient place. Come read it today and get your science unit planned in minutes!

One of our favourite science units to teach is about simple machines or wheels and levers (if you teach in Alberta). We love it because it provides many opportunities for hands-on learning and can be done inside regardless of the weather. Students love to build contraptions and we can use up materials that would generally go in the recycling bin so it’s also a very low-cost science unit. Which of these activities have you tried during your science lessons?

[Read more…] about 15 Simple Machines Activities that Will Hook Your Students

How to Teach Students to Tell Time

by

Teaching time can be a stressfull situation in math class. How do you teach your students to tell time? We've put together all our activities for reading clocks, understanding the 12 Hour and 24 Hour clock, AM/PM, elapsed time and calendars. Come add these activities to your time lessons!

Teaching students to tell time is a necessary and difficult challenge, but time lessons are a life skill.

Some people argue that reading analog clocks is a skill that is slowly disappearing. Perhaps one day, digital clocks will completely take over, but for now, they are still around, causing grief for teachers and students around the world during time lessons in math class.

Come learn some of the activities we use to help our students learn to read the time with these time lessons that will save you time.

[Read more…] about How to Teach Students to Tell Time

How to Thrive During Your Student Teaching

by

Are you ready for your student teaching placement? Come read through some of our best advice to help get you started on the right foot. There are even some free resources to get you started.

Of course, you want to be a great teacher, so congratulations on getting the chance to be a teacher! Your student teaching experience is usually the first chance you’ll get to take control of the classroom. Many factors can come into play and you might have lots of “when I have my own classroom” moments, but use this time as a chance to learn and ask questions.

We’ve been lucky enough to have amazing supervising teachers when we began our careers and it was important to us to take on student teachers when we were ready for it. Passing on our knowledge is important. This is all the advice we have given to our student teachers over the years and we hope it can help you, too.

[Read more…] about How to Thrive During Your Student Teaching

9 Quick Games to Teach Your Students

by

Quick games are a great way to help your students transition, build relationships, foster teamwork and give your students a brain break between instruction and working. We've pulled together some of our favourites. Come read the whole post.

The pressure is always on teachers to move through the curriculum and to use their learning time as wisely as possible. We agree. There are already enough interruptions to learning these days that you don’t need to create more distractions. So, why would we encourage you to place games with your students? Quick games are one way we build relationships, teach students to follow directions, teach our classroom management expectations and foster teamwork between classmates. Come read some of our favourite quick games you can use in your upper elementary classroom or with your fellow teachers.

[Read more…] about 9 Quick Games to Teach Your Students

How to Bring Social Studies Lessons to Life

by

Are your social studies lessons dry and boring? Are they missing different perspectives and seem a little textbookish? We've put together a list of ways to make your lessons engaging and relevant for your modern students. Come read!

If you’ve ever had an amazing teacher who brought history to life for you, then you probably enjoyed learning. A great teacher throws away the social studies textbook. He or she allows students to explore history in real and relevant ways. This teaches about the past, but also how to learn and think critically about the future.

We love teaching social studies, but honestly, we very rarely teach it using the textbook. For one thing, textbooks provide a pretty condensed and cleansed version of the past. The reading level is way above our students’ comprehension skills. We use textbooks as reference materials only.

That means we need to have a way to bring social studies lessons alive for our students.

[Read more…] about How to Bring Social Studies Lessons to Life

Spring Classroom Activities To Make You Bloom

by

Spring is here and we have collected our favourite spring classroom activities to help you get through spring fever. Come read our list a get some ideas you can use right away.

Spring is a great time in upper elementary classrooms. By this point in the school year, students understand the routines and things tend to start running smoothly. Of course, there is also the spring fever that tends to creep in and make students a little squirrely as the weather changes. Nothing says spring like the smell of damp socks and slushy halls after recess breaks.

We put together some of our favourite spring classroom activities that we use to keep students learning and moving forward. Come see which of these would work in your upper elementary classroom.

[Read more…] about Spring Classroom Activities To Make You Bloom